1. Introduction

Those who proclaim that liberation from saṃsāra comes through repeated meditation on it seem to be able to do just anything: they have been blessed by Agni Vaiśvānara.^[1]

We saw in the previous chapter that meditation was the key soteriological practice in the unitary brahma-vidyā doctrine of the Brahma-Sūtra. There was, however, another Vedāntic doctrine of meditation, one which directly concerned Śaṅkara’s favorite Upaniṣadic texts—the negative descriptions of the Self—and occasionally the future mahā-vākyas. Except for the Brahma-Siddhi of Maṇḍana Miśra, we know about it only from Śaṅkara’s Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad and Sureśvara’s Vārttika thereon, as well as the Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi. In some cases, this type of meditation was called prasaṅkhyāna, and it was not a Vedāntic innovation: it was appropriated from the tradition of Yoga. We will see in the case of one of its proponents, Bhartṛprapañca, just how the two kinds of meditation were different, but for now we note two key points of departure. First, whereas the Brahma-Sūtra doctrine promoted assimilative meditation that aimed at becoming Brahman in kind, prasaṅkhyāna was generally reductive and aimed at full identity with Brahman that implied the loss of one’s separate existence. Second, and related to the first, the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna was thoroughly steeped in Yoga psychology and practice: whereas in the Brahma-Sūtra, ignorance that we identified as the root cause of transmigration in the Introduction had no prominent role—generally the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa system is focused on systematizing the Upaniṣadic meditations and takes embodiment for granted—the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna was a part of the therapeutic paradigm worldview.

We may put this in the following way: even if ignorance was part of the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa system, it was at best a cover of the Brahman-characteristics that the Self innately possesses, and the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa meditation did not aim at removing such ignorance but at developing the innate characteristics, specifically the feature of experiential bliss consisting in the ability to enjoy all desires and accomplish all resolves.^[2] In the prasaṅkhyāna doctrine, on the other hand, meditation was explicitly geared towards the removal of ignorance, which kept the Self separate from Brahman, by immersing the mind the product of ignorance in Brahman. Furthermore, although the two doctrines shared the same scriptural network, prasaṅkhyāna put a recognizably yogic twist to it.

Historically, it would appear that many pre-Śaṅkara Vedāntins were advocates of some form of prasaṅkhyāna. A few indications suggest, for instance, that a prominent prasaṅkhyāna-vādin was Brahmadatta, a pre-Śaṅkara Vedāntin who is identified by Sureśvara’s commentator Jñānāmṛta as the character behind the following idea put forward in Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi 1.67:

Some, relying on the strength of their own tradition, say: “The cognition ‘I am Brahman’ that is produced from the Vedāntic statement does not dispel ignorance on its mere appearance.–How then?–It drives away ignorance through the accumulation of meditation for him who meditates day after day for a long time. The evidence for this is the text ‘Becoming a god, he joins the gods.’”^[3]

While Jñānāmṛta is dated to 1800 CE by Potter and is unlikely to be historically reliable, Ānandagiri in his comments on the section of the Sambandha-Vārttika where Sureśvara discusses prasaṅkhyāna says that it was Brahmadatta who relied on the doctrine of niyoga and upheld the notion that knowledge of the unity of the Self required an injunction of meditation.^[4] This Brahmadatta is provisionally dated to 600-700 AD by Nakamura.^[5]

Another, related doctrine is presented by Sureśvara in continuation of the same passage:

Others say: “By means of meditation one should bring about another, special cognition of the Self. By this cognition, the Self is known, and only this cognition dispels ignorance, not the cognition of the Self arisen from the Upaniṣads. The following statements have this meaning: ‘Having known, one should cultivate insight;’ ‘The Self should be seen: it should be heard about, pondered, meditated over,’ ‘One should search out, investigate that Self.’”^[6]

This has commonly been identified as the doctrine of Śaṅkara’s contemporary Maṇḍana Miśra. Śaṅkara himself discusses a variant of this idea in Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.7, probably in some earlier formulation.

It is not clear how much, and if at all, the two views presented by Sureśvara in the quoted passage are different. In fact, it would appear from the Vārttika that the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna had an impressive variety of detail in what is oftentimes a fascinating interaction of Yoga, Vedānta, and the two forms of Mīmāṃsā. We will not go into all these details in the chapter, but the key differences concerned the nature of the injunction of meditation on the Self, whether meditation obtained through bhāvanā or niyoga, what was the hierarchical structure of the injunction and the negative descriptions of the Self, including the identity statements of the Upaniṣads, etc. One of the prominent prasaṅkhyāna-vādins, Maṇḍana Miśra, argued vehemently against the possibility of injunctions in the domain of the Upaniṣads, including meditation.

Such differences notwithstanding, however, all forms of prasaṅkhyāna addressed themselves to the same problem—yet another striking difference from the Brahma-Sūtra—which concerned the nature of language in its incarnation in scripture, and its capacity to convey knowledge of Brahman. In general terms, this problem said: knowing through scripture is knowing second-hand; it is a form of knowing in which Brahman is not directly experienced, and therefore scriptural knowledge must be followed by meditation that culminates in a vision of Brahman or the Self. We will unravel the details of this problem in the chapter, but for the time being we may think of it as the distinction between perceptual and book knowledge, say, of the parakeet who has found it convenient to observe the world from the top of my head and that I am immediately aware of as I write, and the parrots in Maṇḍana Miśra’s house that “were heard repeating sentences like 'Is validity intrinsic to knowledge, or extrinsic? Is Karma the giver of fruit, or is it God?’”^[7] about which I can read with some amusement but without certainty, not the least because of what kind of entities they are. A variety of the problem of language said that scripture presents Brahman as a relational entity, a definite description obtained through attribution of characteristics, which must culminate in the vision of Brahman as a non-relational, non-dual entity. Both these features of the problem were crucial for Śaṅkara’s notion of the identity statements that morphed into mahā-vākyas, because the mahā-vākya doctrine developed in direct response to these two concerns.

It is important to emphasize that the advocates of this type of meditation were Advaitins and bhedābheda-vādins of the aupādhika type (Bhartṛprapañca), theologians with whom Śaṅkara would have had little or no disagreement on the conclusion that ultimately, in any case in the state of liberation, there was nothing but Brahman. In other words, this was a doctrine much closer to home than the Brahma-Sūtra account.

The doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna developed around a few key texts from the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka. One was the statement that introduced the triple process of Vedāntic sādhana, Yājñavalkya’s ātmā vā are draṣṭavyaḥ śrotavyo mantavyo nididhyāsitavyaḥ. The nididhyāsitavya part was specifically related to texts that introduce meditation on the Self or Brahman, such as ātmety evopāsīta, “One should meditate on it as the Self.”^[8] The most important among these was vijñāya prajñāṃ kurvīta, “Having known, one should cultivate insight,” from Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.21, for two reasons. First, it seemed to promote just the sequence of knowing Brahman that the prasaṅkhyāna doctrine wanted: having first known, learned from scripture, one should cultivate insight, meditate. Second, the text was followed by a statement that those who wish to know the Self practice sacrifice and other Vedic forms of action (4.4.22), and by the cultivation of certain virtues (4.4.23). These texts are known to us from the Brahma-Sūtra account, and just like the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa our prasaṅkhyāna-vādins wanted ritual and the related āśrama practices to accompany meditation in the pursuit of liberation, but the set of virtues in 4.4.23 in prasaṅkhyāna seems to have corresponded to the yama-niyama complex in Yoga.

In this chapter, thus, we will introduce the doctrine of prasaṅkhyāna. I will begin by offering an account of the soteriology of the prominent pre-Śaṅkara Vedāntin Bhartṛprapañca. There we will become acquainted, for one thing, with the form of jñāna-karma-samuccaya or the combination of action and knowledge that Śaṅkara was most explicitly arguing against, but more importantly we will have the chance to see forms of the two kinds of meditation side by side, or rather in progression. Then I will introduce prasaṅkhyāna in the Pātañjala-Yoga-Śāstra, where we will see the key issues that this kind of meditation was addressing. Next, I will reconstruct the contours of the Vedāntic notion of prasaṅkhyāna from the works of Śaṅkara and Sureśvara. We will end the chapter with Maṇḍana Miśra and the doctrine of meditation on Brahman in its fullest expression.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

saṃsāra-darśanābhyāsāt tan-muktiṃ ye pracakṣate |
nākāryaṃ vidyate teṣāṃ vaiśvānara-varāśrayāt. Sureśvara’s Vārttika 1.4.700.

[2]:

The only place in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa where some doctrine of ignorance can be teased out is the beginning of the second pāda of the third adhyāya, which discusses the creation of objects in the dream state. The commentators are sharply divided on the interpretation, but sūtra 5 and 6 seem to point out that the characteristics of the Self are hidden either through the wish of the Lord or through association with the body. See also Solomon 1969:116-124.

[3]:

kecit svasampradāya-balāvaṣṭambhād āhuḥ, yad etad vedānta-vākyāt ahaṃ brahma iti vijñānaṃ samutpadyate, tan naiva svotpatti-mātreṇājñānaṃ nirasyati. kiṃ tarhi? ahany ahani drāghīyasā kālenopāsīnasya sato bhāvanopacayāt niḥśeṣam ajñānam apagacchati, devo bhūtvā devān apyeti [Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.1.2ff] iti śruteḥ.

[4]:

ĀG on Sureśvara’s Sambandha-Vārttika 797. On Brahmadatta, read (cautiously) in Hiriyanna 1928; Pandey 1983:237-43; Nakamura 2004:181- 84; Balasubramanian 1988:65-6. Potter’s date for Jñānāmṛta is given in the online updated Bibliography of Indian Philosophies, http://faculty.washington.edu/kpotter/ckeyt/home.htm, accessed 2.2.2017.

[5]:

Nakamura 2004:181.

[6]:

apare varṇayanti upāsanenātma-viṣayaṃ viśiṣṭaṃ vijñānāntaraṃ bhāvayet, tenātmā jñāyate, avidyā-nivartakaṃ ca tad eva, nātma-viṣayaṃ veda-vākya-janitaṃ vijñānam iti. etasminn arthe vacanāny api—vijñāya prajñāṃ kurvīta [BAU 4.4.21], draṣṭavyaḥ śrotavyo mantavyo nididhyāsitavyaḥ [2.4.5], so 'nveṣṭavyaḥ sa vijijñāsitavyaḥ [Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.7.1.3] ityādīni. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.7.

[7]:

Mahadevan 1968:27.

[8]:

Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.7.